american history tv is on social media. follow us @c-spanhistory. up next, another class from our series lectures in history. >> hi and welcome to fit nation. we are talking today about 1980s workout culture. this is, i believe now, our third week together virtually. i hope you all are doing well. i'm going to go ahead and share my screen with you and we can get right started. okay, great. so as always what we're looking at in this class today is about the rise of the american obsession with fitness, with fitness culture, with working out, even as the united states is not a particularly fit nation and even as, if anything, in the past 75 to 100 years or so that we look at in this course, americans have actually become more and more obsessed with the idea of working out as a symbol or a signal of kind of individual virtue and morality even as the ability to do so and having a, quote, unquote, fit body has become another symbol of inequality in this country. so that's the kind of overarching arc of course of the class. today we turn to the 1980s. so the name of the lecture today is a quote from one of the oral histories that i've done for the book research that i'm doing, on which this course is based. and it's, "i would have been a pe teacher." we're going to get to it at the end of the class and i'll tell who you said it. at that historical moment, the people who became the architectures of the physical fitness industry were the if i say physical education teachers. i want to start by talking a little bit about the united states in the 1980s, broad strokes historical context here. a lot of our students, those of you watching at the c-span or new school international, everybody has different levels of preparation and familiarity with american history. i say "america" there because even though i'm a u.s. historian, you all read for this week jenny ellison's article about fat aerobics in canada in this period. i'm always careful to bound my expertise in the united states. it's really important throughout this class, as we have been all semester, to see which of these phenomena become transnational and also how they might look similar and different across national lines. okay. we'll start with top level contacts for america in the 1980s. then we go to talk about the making of an industry. this drawing on the article that you read by mark stern about the rise of the fitness industry from 1960 to 1980, talking a little more detail about what aspects of that industry look like, and also the way that they shaped a workout culture. then we will get to the quote which frames our talk today, "i would have been a pe teacher." we'll talk about a path not taken. physical education track. and why a lot of these folks who became so important in the fitness industry of the 1980s and remain so today, why didn't they become pe teachers? it's not, like most historical phenomena, merely a result of individual decisions, but there are structural factors at work too. so i'm excited to get into that intersection there because it's one of those cases, for me, i didn't anticipate that aspect of this story coming up in my research, but it started bubbling up through oral histories as i mentioned, and then borne out by other archival work which we'll talk about. we'll conclude at the end with, as always, so what, why do we care, why is this little more than a foray about the curiosity of fitness history? i think it's a little more than that and i hope by the end you will too. let's get started. let's recap what we talked about last week. there was a lot going on in the world. in the 1960s and '70s, a kind of alternative perspective on what u.s. historians often refer to as movement culture which is often used to refer to kind of political activism in that period for things like feminism, gay liberation, against the vietnam war, kind of progressive political. what we did in this period, what we did in that same period, was to look at the way that sort of movement culture as it's conventionally understood shaped exercise period in that culture but also we expanded the definition of movement culture in the '60s and '70s to say let's talk about, like, actual movement culture. what kinds, what forms of exercise were taking hold in this period and how were they shaped by that moment. one of the big things that transformed exercise in that era, which will come up very much today, was the introduction of what we now know as cardio, when kenneth cooper, military physician, published his book "aerobics" in 1968, he really expanded the definition of exercise to be far beyond weightlifting and calisthenics which is how it is relatively narrowly defined before then. that revolutionizd the definition of what exercise was and who could participate in it and obviously what kind of bodies it would create. i dove into the case study of the rise of the jogging phenomenon and the idea of the open road, jogging is like a quintessential cardio form of exercise, seen as 100% as sort of objectively salutary and healthful for an increasingly populace. we also talked about a back to nature perspective, a rejection of technology and technocracy and that could be invited by running. of course in a moment when exploration through mind altering substances was quite common, this idea of the runner's high and the endorphins you could get naturally really became kind of part of jogging's mystique in that period. and then we also talked about a simultaneous rise of what we now know as studio fitness, often, almost always, promoted by women, for women, largely, although that has changed now. in that same period of the late 1960s, late 1970s, you see the beginnings and really the flourishing of studio-based fitness workouts, things we'll talk about in a little more detail today, things like jazzercise, founded in 1969, although it really takes hold in the 1980s. things like the barre-based workouts, lottie burke. that idea especially for women who are often looked at askance if they are out in public, alone in the street, particularly exercising, that some of these studio exercises actually created some safer spaces for women to exercise in a moment when exercise for women was becoming much more widely accepted. and there are a lot of contradictions there, which i won't rehash from last week, but which i think will come up a little bit today too. all right. so forging ahead, this was the last slide that we had last week. this connection of jogging in the open road to gentrification. this arc from and that was seen as kind of countercultural and antimaterialistic to become something that might be part of the very materialistic conformist culture it was trying to critique. and if you remember from last week, this is an article from 1980 in "the los angeles times." the title is "bite, bite, bite, the croissant culture is swallowing up the ghettos." at the time it was kind of a way of saying that kind of affluent, upwardly mobile professionals were gentrifying african american neighborhoods and bringing with them cultural tastes, one of them being croissants, one of them being jogging. you see here, sports such as jogging are solitary as are breakfast places and cappuccino cafes, designed for the singles, designed to allow us to be around people without talking to them. fast forward to the consumer items associated with people who once considered themselves current cultural, sought out these what were perceived to be rougher neighborhoods, in some ways as part of that countercultural politics but now jogging and the rest of these things, whole roasted coffee beans, fresh flowers, croissants, et cetera, the closing line of this op-ed is, our precious urban neighborhoods are well on the way to becoming as homogenous as the suburbs we fled. and that's kind of a really important theme to think about in this course in general, as you know, but also today. the way that privatization, capitalism, a kind of corporate ization of many of these grassroots movements in fitness ends up i don't want to say bastardizing them or destroying them because they're still vibrant forms of fitness that exist in our robust fitness industry, but which you can't deny are for people who can afford them even as they were introduced with radical ideas in mind, jogging certainly a pretty good example of that. okay. so let's do, again, this is real top level but i want to talk about some key themes in understanding the united states in the 1980s. so that's a picture from the 1990 movie "bonfire of the vanities," a rendering of tom wolfe's famous book about new york city in the 1980s. if you don't know that book, it's a great novel, never been a greater time to go read it. the protagonist, a wall street guy, fancies himself a master of the universe, married to a beautiful, thin, white woman, they are rich, i won't spoil it, but he gets into a car accident which enmeshes him in an african american neighborhood in new york and the criminal system and kind of points out a lot of the hypocrisy and social inequality that exists in new york city and i would say in other cities in the united states at that time. that's a very unsatisfying description of the movie but i can't include the image without telling you. but some of the key themes i think that come out in that book by tom wolfe which are really important to think about this era is the 1980s is an era of backlash to that movement culture we talked about in the '60s and '70s as a kind of pendulum swing against some of the kind of collective, radical, progressive politics which defined that era. also a time where you both have on the level of government a kind of austerity policy, lots of cutting of social programming and of public funding, whereas at the same time, a kind of widespread i don't want to say acceptance, celebration of extravagance by individuals who can afford it. "bonfire of the vanities" is a really good example of depicting that lifestyle although it's satire, it's pointing out the hypocrisy there. some of you might know the movie "wall street," the phrase "greed is good," fast cars, cocaine, expensive drugs, lifestyles of the rich and famous, if this lecture were three hours long i would show all these video clips, but that celebration of extreme wealth while at the same time social programs are being cut. that is very much part of the kind of '80s ethos as historians understand it and i think people at the time too. with that, unsurprisingly, a whole lot of economic, social, and racial inequality. and we're going to -- i left gender out of there on purpose because i want to talk about the way this period through fitness in particular was both a time when gender inequality continued to be challenged but also reinscribed by the fitness fascinations of the 1980s. morning in america is ronald reagan's 1984 presidential campaign slogan. and i put a question mark there because for a lot of people it was not morning in america. for a lot of people this cutting of social programmings, this kind of ascendant political and cultural conservatism, particularly in the age of hiv/aids which ronald reagan was very late to acknowledge at all as a disease, all of that was not part of a dawning in america. it was probably one of the darkest times in the united states. so i think it's really important, when we see images like this one that i've put up here, to realize that all that glitz and glamour, which by the way, today is very much sort of like being reinvigorated in a kind of like retro, umm, retro celebration of the '80s, that all of that was part of an era in which a lot of people suffered a lot due to these policies. and the last -- the last thing on there, i was going to put it on there but after we had that croissant culture headline last week it came to my attention that some of you don't know what yuppies are. so "yuppie" is a term -- and that's okay. so "yuppie" is a term that referred to young professionals and all the things they liked to do like croissants and jogging. triathalons became big. a little bit of a play on hippies, right? and it is often used mockingly. these are people who are individualistic, they're in it to climb the ladder on their own. they're kind of not that into collective progressive politics but rather into personal advancement through climbing the ranks. and that was very much also part of this '80s moment. so of course i'm leaving a lot out. we didn't even talk about the cold war in this particular slide. but these are some of the cultural themes which i think frame our discussion of fitness in 1980s united states. okay. so we've talked a significant amount about presidential fitness in this case and about what was considered kind of appropriate for a public figure to participate in in terms of fitness. if you look here, this is from a 1983 magazine spread. this is during ronald reagan's first term, that's president ronald reagan there working out on i believe a nautilus machine. you read a lot about the history of nautilus in jonathan black's book for your reading for today. and here, if you take a little closer look at this slide, you can see the president's personal exercise program, how to stay fit. we're not going to do a close textual analysis of this slide, although you certainly can pause it at home. this image on the right of reagan chopping wood, that is totally of a piece with what we talked about earlier in the 20th century with teddy roosevelt getting out in the great outdoors, celebrating the strenuous life through manly sports like chopping wood or in here he talks about horseback riding too. that, there's a real continuity there. but two things here, possibly three, really highlight that this is a different era. one, there's a joke in the caption there, where reagan says, pumping firewood is what the president calls this activity of him splitting logs. so pumping firewood, of course that's a joke about pumping iron, remember the 1970s big bodybuilding flick starring arnold schwarzenegger that we talked about from the very first day of class, even, that kind of brought this really weird subculture of musclehead bodybuilders to the center of american popular culture, such that even the socially conservative president is making jokes about it. now, that's so different, remember when muscle beach was shut down for morals charges in the late 1950s? i mean, that's the world that actually ronald reagan came from. he was around in california in those days. and i should say he was a democrat back then, but that's a story for another day. but then the other thing that i think is super interesting here, the main photo for the piece, reagan on an exercise machine in the gym. that is not kind of traditionally masculine, theodore roosevelt kind of imagery. by 1983, working out in a commercial gym, a man, a straight man, a leader, working on his body in this particular way, is considered not at all to question his masculiity but to uphold it. this is supposed to reflect positively on the president, and it did, because by 1983, fitness is in general becoming a virtue, such that ronald reagan can do it as can some of the subcultural bodybuilding figures who were still considered to be rather suspicious. okay. let's keep going. all right. so i could spend the whole lecture talking about the founder of nautilus. there he is. i am not going to do so because you read a lot about the founding of nautilus in your reading by jonathan black today. but one of the things that i think is really important in looking at this -- in looking at this moment and at this particular figure is the way that machines really shaped this particular history and the proliferation of exercise in the united states. so when he went to -- sorry, i have like a small tech issue right here. let me just look. sorry. i think this is still up, according -- okay, sorry about that. so the founder of nautilus started lifting weights in the 1940s. he was horrified, as you remember from your reading, by the lack of efficiency in lifting traditional bararbells. so he kind of set to work, he didn't have much money back then, he set to work devising what he thought was a more efficient way to lift weights for bodybuilding and for overall health and fitness. what came out of that tinkering, really, this is a guy who was deeply skeptical of scientists, who only had a ninth grade education himself, he said, hey, a ninth grade education in the 1930s is as good as two ph.d.s today, he created the foundation of the machines you can still see in gyms today, machines where, as you see here, in order to increase weights you take out a pin and put them in and you can raise the weight by putting the pin in different places. as you read in your text by jonathan black, he kind of peddled this around at different trade shows and very quickly it became the standard in gyms. and that is really important in this theme that we've been discussing in this class of making gyms the places where more people would exercise than just hard core bodybuilders. so this was less intimidating to a lot of people because it wasn't as clear how much weight you were lifting. you didn't have to heave around all of these plates. and it really revolutionized exercise. and so i think we have got to give him that. at the same time, as you gathered from your reading as well, and this is like the part of his life that i could spend so much time on, funny, i did not mean to assign this reading when our nation would be in the height of this obsession with "tiger king," but jones was a very joe exotic kind of figure. he was into collecting big game, he had hundreds of elephants, reptiles, i believe he had bears too. he wasn't a big cat guy. but he had a hundreds of wild animals on his property in ocala, florida. and he was a -- he was a guy with very contrarian ideas and who was not afraid to share them. i really debated actually showing you some video of him talking, and i'm going to send around the link, but it's pretty objectionable language, to give you a sense, he had six wives, up until the end of his life he continued to get married and get divorced. he married all of these women or at least four of the six of them when they were under 20 years old. he went on record calling his fourth wife an old bag when she was 24. i watched one interview with him where he said -- someone asked him his thoughts on women, he said, i think women are great, i think all men should own several of them. so he had these really offensive ideas. and that has made him, unfortunately, today, a bit of a folk hero among some like hard core men's rights groups who see him as a guy who was speaking to power very early and refused to bow to emerging ideas of what was not yet called political correctness but which came to be so. i could go on and on with lots of examples of that kind of behavior for him. and i should say, so the men's rights people celebrate him today for those ideas but then in fitness circles, i would say despite those ideas, he is actually -- he's still celebrated as well. so some people call him the founder of h.i.t., high intensity interval training. you see on fitness blogs everywhere a focus on this hero in the fitness industry, without focusing on some of the really objectionable things that he said and did. one of the things that i want to point out is, it's often common in writing the history of any kind of period, to focus only on the famous people. some people call this great man history. and i think the focus on jones and the impact of his nautilus machines sometimes can err in that direction. so one of the things in the research i've been doing is asking, what impact did jones and his innovations have on your life? one person i talked to who asked specifically for her name not to be included in this story, she went on to be very famous in the women's fitness space. she started earlier in her career as a sales representative for him, selling nautilus machines, because she said, hey, they were the best machines on the market. but actually when she went to visit him in his huge ranch in florida, she was actually so horrified by his utter racism and language i won't utter here, that she actually left as a sales representative for nautilus and left a lot of money on the table. so whenever you go to the gym and work out on one of those machines with the pins, remember, you know, that it has this history a lot of people don't know. his son actually went on to develop hammer strength, which is an even more widespread brand that you will see around today too. i don't believe his son shared all of the same ideas that he did. so i will only attribute those to senior. okay. so at that same -- so he invents nautilus, he comes from this very kind of macho background which it's funny, he got in a lot of conflict with some of the traditional bodybuilders who saw this fancy new high tech machine as being -- as getting in the way of real lifting, like barbell, heavy lifting gyms. so he had that conflict with those guys. but even as he expanded who came into gyms, he was somebody who did not have any kind of progressive, positive ideas about inclusiveness as part of his mission at all. now, at the same time, the fitness industry is expanding in a very different way. we talked a little bit about the founding of jazzercise last week and how in 1969 this dancer, judy shepherd, went to ymca to get her fitness levels tested. the equipment they had didn't even have metrics to measure a woman's body and they were shocked that just a dancer could be such a powerful -- so strong. so she goes on to create jazzercise, this dance cardio format, which has a really interesting business story, which is often not told. jazzercise, which, again, dance cardio, there's a guy in this picture here but it's mostly women, it is meant to enable women who might be self-conscious about taking time for themselves to exercise, about looking at themselves in the mirror when they exercise, to kind of free them from all that and allow them to move together for health and fitness. now, the business side of this i think is super interesting. oops. oh, no, i'm going to have to go back to that one. so jazzercise becomes a franchise. and what a franchise means is that individual people rather than working for jazzercise inc. or working for judy shepherd would go and pay a fee in order to start their own little jazzercise businesses. now, by 1984, you can see by this little clip right here, jazzercise is the second fastest growing franchise business in the country after domino's pizza, those two might go hand in hand, right? and by the way, quite a few fast food things are on there too. but one of the reasons this is important is, one, because the franchise model continues to be a really important form of growth for the fitness industry. and it has been for a long time. but two, jazzercise franchisees are almost 100% women. so are the participants. and so it becomes part of this growing fitness industry where women are some of the real prime movers here. and i've interviewed lots of people in and around the jazzercise world. and one of the things that a lot of them said is these franchisees were women who were staying at home with their kids or women who were kind of in between jobs because of either their husbands work or other family commitments. and this allowed them to have economic self-determination and work in a sense of community while they attended to these other commitments. that's an important story about this that falls out of the picture when we just think about leotards, leg warmers, and the kind of esthetic of that period, which was pretty cool. but let's go back for a second. i do want to point out again, the great man or great woman theory of history, just like jones is not the only guy who made exercise equipment, as you know from your jonathan black reading, but also judy shepherd was not the only one doing dance cardio, dance exercise. jackie sorenson, the same year as judy shepherd, creates aerobic dancing, and she becomes extremely popular on the east coast and she has classes at ymcas and kind of all over the place. one of the things that i think is really interesting about both these women and how these businesses came about, they were living adjacent to military basis. judy shepherd relocated to san diego county and lived near the military base there. so a lot of her students were military wives who were often there because their husbands had been deployed and in the kind of shadow of this hypermasculine military complex, they find jazzercise. many of them became certified instructors and franchisees because when their husbands got reassigned, they didn't want to lose their exercise so they had to learn it to bring it with them. that's how that business spread around the world, and it really did, very quickly. jackie sorenson was also on a military base with her husband in guam, i believe, in this article. she was an air force wife. it doesn't say where, i'm almost positive it was in guam. she too, at the behest of her husband's schedule and work, she created this incredible program there that ended up, again, mostly for women being a real source of, you know, self affirmation, exercise, strength, et cetera. i do want to point out, again, a close reading of this piece right here, that a lot of these programs, even as i fully stand by the idea that these absolutely empowered women and created new opportunities for women, you know, some of the language, this is for the grossly obese, sorenson claims, aerobic dancing could be dangerous. there's weight loss language, today still but even more so then, women's fitness was talked about primarily as a form of weight loss rather than anything else. okay. so we've got the machine side of the industry, right? nautilus machines, you read about lifecycle, the bikes, the pilates reformer, you read about in your reading too. now you have studios and renting rooms in ymcas or within other gyms or in health spas, that's where you have a lot of that dance cardio stuff happening. but then you also have the rise of the health club as social club. i point this out here, because this is an interesting story of how fitness culture bounces in and out of art and reality. so there was this story that ran in "rolling stone" called "looking for mr. goodbody" in the early 1980s about a club in los angeles called the sports connection. now, almost everybody that i've interviewed for this book project about who was in fitness in l.a. in the 1980s mentions this sports connection, like this was the place to be seen, people said it was so much a kind of singles bar environment that they called it the sports direction. and it was such a kind of new plagues, the idea that a gym was not a sweaty dungeon where a bunch of suspicious guys went to heave iron, it was where the beautiful people hung out. it was a new idea. it was considered a very california idea. so this guy aaron latham, he writes about it for "rolling stone" and they make a movie about it called "perfect" which i recommend you all watch, someone said it's the only movie out there which has a full-length aerobic series in it, you can learn the choreography from watching it. john travolta and jamie lee curtis star in it, you can see these are the stars. it's really something. it gets kind of panned at the box office, but it's something, in the mid-1980s, there's enough fascination with fitness as a phenomenon and with the gym, it's set at the sports connection, that there's a major feature film about it. i should say there's an interesting regional aspect to it also. like the whole narrative there is that like this kind of smart, savvy, new yorker goes out to california to learn what these brain-dead, fitness-obsessed people are doing out there. jamie lee curtis, the star fitness instructor, even as she's really good as it, it suggests something's wrong with her, that she's damaged in some way. i suggest watching that, i think it's on amazon prime, just to kind of wrap your head around a lot about the way that the culture was seeing fitness still with some suspicion but with increasing fascination during that period. okay. so what was most responsible probably or who, who and what were most responsible for proliferating 1980s fitness culture outside of brick and mortar gyms? brick and mortar gyms, as you know from your reading on the rise of the industry, were booming, from like 1960 to 1990, the growth is exponential in the fitness industry. and as you also know from that piece, what's happening in those clubs is changing, like the professional organization goes from being called the racquet and sports association to racquet and health clubs, i'm not going to say the acronym, but what's important as the article you read for homework points out and as people i interviewed point out too, you saw some of those racquet clubs tearing up their racquet and squash facilities as they move from sport to recreational exercise. but let's get back to the lady in the leotard here. so this is jane fonda. jane fonda was already a celebrated actress and controversial activist. by 1979, when she founds her workout studio on robertson boulevard in los angeles. it's actually not well-known that she was at the time married to tom hayden, the left wing activist, founder of students for a democratic society. she actually founded the workout studio to support california's campaign for economic democracies organization. and one of the things interesting about that that she wrote about in her memoir is that even though she was channeling millions of dollars into this -- his nonprofit, he was always really dismissive of the workout studio and really thought it was kind of silly and superficial and, you know, what are you ladies doing in there. meanwhile, one of the ways that she made dance exercise so popular was she was already a celebrity, so it had her name attached to it, but two, vhs. video cassettes. so no matter how many more people were coming into gyms, no matter how many clubs were being built, nothing could compare with having this videotape in your hand, not that cheap, by the way, fitness videos in those days were $40 or $50, but you could bring it home, pop it into your vcr and do it any time. that was really responsible for promoting and proliferating fitness culture far beyond any brick and mortar environment. i'll also say, this is super interesting, you know, i spoke a lot last week and alluded to it a little bit this week, about the way that, like, jazzercise in particular, but a lot of these dance exercise formats were not, even as they were i think very genuinely pro-woman, they were not overtly feminist at all. they were still talking about thin thighs and really did not seem to me or i think to themselves either at that time kind of of a piece with the feminist activism of the era. jane fonda was very different. she in her book, which came with the workout, she talks about how exercise is about bodily self-determination, how she wants this book and this program to be as much for secretaries as beverly hills women. she talks about -- she has this whole feminist line, basically, about reclaiming her own body, which is very, very different from the language you hear from a lot of other dance exercise women. at the same time, she gets criticized a lot for perpetuating a kind of slim feminiity and a white femininity and an affluent femininity through her workout and that continues to be something that she's criticized for even though it was not an aspect of her goals. so this is an image from jenny ellison's article that you read about fat women's aerobics culture in the 1980s. and i love, love, love that article, because i think it highlights so much the way that even as fitness culture was in many ways deeply problematic in this period, the answer by people who might resist it wasn't i'm not going to work out, it was like, i'm going to remake and appropriate this thing and make it my own in a way that feels more inclusive and honest and genuine. and so ellison's article was so great, i think, because she emphasizes groups like this one, large as life fitness, and other fat women who realize the kind of thin-dominant -- dominance of thinness in a lot of these exercise spaces or presumption that the goal of going there is to become thin. they say, no, don't throw the baby out with the bath water, community, movement, exercise, health, it's awesome but we want to do it in a way that affirms bodies like us as more than a stop on the way to becoming thin as something good in their own right. and i think that's a really powerful angle, because a lot of times there's a kind of simplistic critique of fitness culture that all it is is perpetuating a thin ideal. while that's often not wrong, i think that overlooks really important stories like this. another group of marginalized people who are so important to the creation of contemporary fitness culture are of course lgbtq people. there would be no gym culture in this country without those people, full stop, no question. i want to pause and talk about the way that operated. this gentleman on the left, that's john blair. he was both a gym entrepreneur and a nightclub impresario when those things were very intertwined for him. he talks about being a young gay man in los angeles in 1970 and get this, this was in his "new york times" obituary, and about going to what he -- going to the first gay gym in los angeles and having a place where he could find nautilus machines and wear tube socks and kind of be himself. and to me, having just put together all that material about arthur jones who was like homophobic, racist, misogynist, and then to hear john blair who was a huge activist, who is queer himself and a huge activist for lgbtq rights, talk about the presence of nautilus machines at the gym being a kind of -- one sign it was a good place or one sign it was a place of solace to me is a really important point about the way that particular spaces or devices or products or experiences get remade and reused by everyday people. and i think that's important to think about when we think about the history of any of these phenomena. so blair has a gym in l.a., and then he has -- also has gyms in new york and nightclubs. and he talks about how during hiv/aids, going to the gym and having what he called the chelsea boy physique, the kind of fit,muscular body, became such an important way to showcase that you weren't sick, you weren't wasting away from hiv/aids. so wearing that signifier of health on your body was one way that kind of fitness culture operated in that period. this other, molly fox studios over here, i had the great pleasure of interviewing molly fox, still considered one of the leaders in the fitness industry. she used a really great term which some of you have heard in your other courses, a third place, to describe the role of studios, her studio in particular and others in that period in new york city. and she talks about the marginalization of lgbtq people in that period. and gyms, particularly in new york where she had her studio, chelsea, there was a kind of place where you weren't going to be marginalized, you weren't going to be seen as diseased, you weren't going to be seen as othered and these were incredible sources of community in that regard. it's important to disaggregate the big sports connection, the independently owned studios like molly fox, the equipment aspect of the industry that we learned about from jonathan black and through nautilus, and to see they all intersect and they're all kind of part of this amorphous thing called gym culture but they all had very different functions and all serve in some ways as places that were -- some are excluded and in places which are also a force for inclusivity as well. what i wanted to for this very last bit of class here is talk about this path not taken. so let me pause for a second and explain what i'm talking about here. one of the things that kind of bubbled up in my oral history interview that i was surprised about is that i've interviewed all of these luminaries from the 1980s in particular, this kind of high point when, to put one digit on it, the middle of the 1980s, 22 million people are doing aerobics in the united states. that is something that no one had ever even heard about probably 15 years earlier, even ten years earlier. and what i kept hearing from people who came up through this period and became really these big shots in the industry was, either i was a phys ed teacher or phys ed major, if born in another era i would have been a pe teacher. i started to think about that, all of a sudden there was this boom in private industry that created all these opportunities in a private realm for people who -- extraordinarily talented people, by the way, who would have otherwise gone into teaching pe. so that became another kind of avenue to look at how the rise of this industry has i think in some ways contributed to these kind of austerity policies which have drained really quality physical education from the public realm. so here are some examples of intersections which a lot of people told me about as well. so jackie sorenson who you remember founded aerobic dancing, she was involved with the presidential council for youth fitness, she wrote physical education curricula, you can see here. this is in 1990, president george bush, the first, appoints around schwarzenegger as head of the presidential council on fitness, which we've talked a lot about, if you remember back to dwight eisenhower and john f. kennedy. i want to pause here because this is remarkable. we talked about how marginal muscle beach was and how marginal weightlifting was. the idea that a republican conservative president would be appointing arnold schwarzenegger as the head of a very staid presidential council on fitness, that says a lot about mainstreaming of fitness culture in the united states, that this dance instructor promoting exercise for girls would be writing pe curriculum, that does suggest real change that i don't want to minimize. on the other hand, i want to close by talking about a few people who talked about that path not taken. so that quote, can you imagine i would have been a phys ed teacher, tammy webb, she's still famous, she calls herself buns of steel, she became very successful in the '80s and '90s particularly through fitness infomercials. she starred in a whole lot of dvds and did very well for herself through that. when i interviewed her she told me she was a kid who grew up in rural california, around a lot of boys, she was super sporty, she was into weightlifting, ended up competing in weightlifting. she was the only girl in her class at chico state to graduate in exercise science. she said if she hadn't graduated when she did, in the late 1970s, her only opportunity would have been to go and be a phys ed teacher. a career path which, looking back, when i talked to her just a couple of years ago, on the enormous career that she built for herself, seemed like it would have been a real missed opportunity. she went after school, she went on to teach aerobics and other kinds of fitness, on cruises, at a luxury spa called the golden door. she was big on the fitness convention circuit which was just born in the 1980s. and she really became somebody who shaped and created this industry, and who, and i don't fault her for this, feels like she lucked out by being born at the right time, when these opportunities existed, because for a girl like her, born ten, 15 years early, she would have ended up as a pe teacher. being a pe teacher i think most of you know, because we've talked about it before, particularly in moments of austerity around social spending and public spending, is not a particularly glamorous lifestyle, although i give a lot of kudos to people who do it because i think it's really important. similarly, i want to focus on these folks here. that's kathy and peter davis, in this picture here, they're married, they're still married today, and that is carol scott. so all three of these folks, all three of these folks have some connection to that same kind of story. and i group them all together here because the spoiler alert, where they end up is, kathy and peter davis founded really the first professional association for first aerobics instructors called idea international exercise dance association, it's an original acronym. and carol -- and that was in california, they both went to school in san diego and started that. and then carol scott a few years later started essentially an east coast version of that called eca, east coast alliance, eca fitness. and all of them, kathy -- kathy and peter came out of the tennis world, collegiate tennis, kathy and carol told me rather similar stories of being jocks, of studying phys ed, and graduating in the early 1980s into this dynamic realm of commercial fitness that they never would have imagined existed before, and by -- and of having that opportunity to take up that felt like one you couldn't give up. carol, who i spoke to recently, expressed i think a really interesting perspective on the difference of the paths that lay before her. she was like, i could go be creating programming and working out with all of these people from different walks of life and being at the center of this dynamic industry, or i could go roll out the balls in the gymnasium and follow this preexisting curriculum which i had very little power to change. and that's a story that i heard again and again, and i point this out because all of these folks here not only chose personal careers in fitness but went on to really create some of the professional infrastructure for the industry and for industry professionals, which did not exist before. just so you know, what was one of the things that those organizations created was kind of conventions and the way it would work and still does in some places, you apply with your programming, whether there you see spinning or step or whatever it was, and then you present like an academic conference and different fitness professionals come and see your workout. i don't know exactly what's being presented there. but that was at eca fitness where full disclosure, i have presented as well quite a few years ago, i was back up talent, though, people in the back with different outfits. okay so last example of this, i've interviewed both of these folks. it's elizabeth hathpap, and fred devito, the power couple of bar fitness in america, cofounders of exhale, and they worked with the burke method when it first came to the united states in the '70s and 1980s and lydia back, brought the method to the u.s. and fred devito in telling me his story and how he came to it, he was a p.e. teacher and had a union job and it was then secure, and his then girlfriend and wife elizabeth was a dancer, working at loddy burke, no men were allowed on the premise, and he went and got a side job working the desk, and then he started getting trained and he made this really tough decision, which he said his parents just didn't understand in some ways, the beginning of him leaving this secure teaching job to go and work in this really fitness industry, and i was taken by the way he described why he did that. he said to me, and i think to the lot of you particularly being at the new school, leaving the public realm to work in private industry feels like that's somehow a move towards a more like exclusive or exclusionary route which in some ways i think that instinct is right. what devito explained to me, which has opened my eyes in a lot of ways, look, when i was teaching p.e., i was teaching to the kids who were already jocks, out of shape or humiliated or felt excludes, they would get a note or sit on the side or not try, and the way the curriculum was structured, it only perpetuated that. there was like no opportunity for me to actually get people to love movement or to create kind of a more collectively inspiring environment, and he said in the studio world, which was so new, there was actually that opportunity to create those kind of environments, and so that's the kind of thing that you hear a lot. and in this particular case as well, he just has a really -- possesses a really interesting honor, which was that he was the first man, apparently allowed ever into one of the classes, and this lydia bach here who they worked with for years, the woman who brought the method from europe to the united states. okay. i'm going to close, i went a little bit later with this strange image. that's lydia bach, possibly, not the same photo shoot, but lydia and arnold schwarzenegger locked in this strange arm wrestling competition, grinning arm wrestling and i do not have a date for this class or this particular image but it was used in a promotion for the burke method about how to get strong. i close on this one because i think you can see that one of the things that happens in the 1980s in this crazy and divergent and multifaceted history of fitness in the united states is you start to see a lot of convergence, something like the method born out of dance on manchester street in london for society ladies, and arnold schwarzenegger who comes out of like the muscle beach, super macho male body building culture, there's a mainstream convergence happening in this period where there is a much wider spread celebration happening across the culture. at the same time in a moment of defunding of public institutions and austerity for all that enthusiasm about fitness, what you're seeing boom is the private sector, the rise of private clubs, vhs tapes for sale, studio, franchise, whatever, it's not all one thing, and they function in ways that are great for some people and not great for other people but it's the private realm, which is really really booming in this period but for the very public, not a lot of substance, professions that you see with ronald reagan on a novelist screen, and george bush, pointing a body builder to the presidential council for youth fitness. on that note, i will let you go. i look forward to hearing your thoughts on this talk, if you joining us from c-span, i'm very easy to find online. thank you so much for joining me. have a wonderful week, and thank you, c-span for inviting me on. bye. >> did you know, you can listen to lectures in history on the go. stream it as a podcast anywhere anytime. you're watching american history tv. recently on american history tv, ron james discussed his book, the truman court, law and the limits of loyalty and whether harry truman set the precedent for politicized supreme court for nominations. >> flipped over, it's a shock to the system, and i think it's an excellent point, steve, that i have actually spent a good amount of time thinking about over the last few years, about how that was a shock to americans reading their newspapers or listening to the radio, and who even is this guy and what's happening here, and he's in charge, and we're at war. and so, and it kind of came to a head in later times, and part of why it came to a head was in part because of his supreme court nominees as he just began to nominate his friends. which brings us to the tom clark, one of his friends. he nominated tom clark to be attorney general of the united states. tom clark at the time was gosh, a year older than i am now. i'm 44, tom clark was 45 at the time. clark had been an unexceptional law student and ended up in washington by accident. roosevelt wanted to hire his older brother, an exceptional law student, big time lawyer, and was doing grand things, and tom clark's older brother said, no, i'm doing very well in texas. the senator from texas said to the white house, well, i've got his younger brother, will you take him. they said, fine, send him up, and they gave tom clark initially something of a lackey job in the department of justice. clark worked his way up. what he might have lacked in perhaps academic ability, he certainly made up for in work ethic. he became truman's attorney general, and became very successful in being an aggressive attorney general. in part because he recognized that he was not the best lawyer in the building. and so what he did was manage the department of justice and say what can we do to advance the administration's agenda. now, we expect that of our attorneys general. and the president certainly expects it of the attorney general but at the time, prior to that, the attorney general had generally been kind of like we think of now, at least lawyers think of now, the solicitor general, this exceptional lawyer with these impeccable credentials. you can get someone in there, president trump had senator jeff sessions in there, and carrying out his agenda, and president george w. bush had alberto gonzalez, neither of those are these great incredible legal minds. they were effective, though, for the time in which they were there and carrying out the president's agenda, and that -- i would contend that began in earnest for tom clark, working for president harry truman. >> all of the presidency programs that have been featured on american history tv are available to watch online anytime at c-span.org/history. how exactly did america get up to its neck in debt. >> we believe one of the greatest characteristics of being american is that we are striving to provide equal opportunity for all citizens. >> c-span's video documentary competition 2022, students across the country are giving us behind the scenes looks as they work on they entries, using the 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